—————
Oh. So you think they thought I was simply trespassing? Maybe that was part of it. And in that case another lesson beckons. In literature there is no room for territoriality. So politely ignore all warnings about ‘cultural appropriation’ and the like. Go where your pen takes you. Fiction is freedom, and freedom is indivisible.
On December 31, Inez and I – an advance guard – returned to Strong Place in late afternoon. Well before midnight we were out on the street. We too were homeless nomads. The house was a charred and sopping hulk.
I have crossed the equator and I’m now standing on the threshold of the second half…
Life, as I said, is artistically lifeless; and its only unifying theme is death.
*1 The Historikerstreit (‘the historians’ quarrel’ of 1986–9) saw the last attempts to ‘historicise’ or ‘relativise’ (or somehow normalise) the Third Reich. From then on Nazism was firmly identified as a geopolitical ‘singularity’; it stands alone.
PART III
DISSOLUTIONS: ANTEPENULTIMATE
Chapter 1 The Shadow-Line
Embedment: The dismissal of shame
One evening in the late 1970s three baby boomers sought each other out at a drinks party in London: Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis of the New Statesman, and Joan Juliet Buck of Vogue. Christopher had met her through his onetime girlfriend, Anna Wintour, then of Harper’s Bazaar, and Martin had met her through his onetime girlfriend, Julie Kavanagh, the UK correspondent of Women’s Wear Daily.
‘Hello boys.’
Joan Juliet was a darkly imposing beauty, an editor, an actress (and later a novelist), whose first language was French.
‘My dear, you look absolutely radiant.’
This was Christopher. He was of course already merciless in public debate, but his social manners were decorous and harmonial (and some of his embellishments look florid in print, unleavened by his smile). Hitch reserved especial courtliness for women. It is there in his writing, too. Descriptions of attractive girls have him reaching for words like ‘poised’, ‘fragrant’, and ‘ravissant’.
‘Aglow with youth and vigour,’ he went on with a bow. ‘And forgive me for saying that I’m so pleased, because I heard you’d been in the wars. Those little uh, feminine ailments. If it wasn’t one thing, it was the other. I trust that’s all in the past?’
‘Not quite,’ said Joan Juliet. ‘It’s my fucking tits now.’
Candid, defiant, undiminished, and humorous: Christopher and Martin very much admired this remark, and for a while it was often quoted, joining the innumerable phrases and themelets and reference points that metronomically punctuated their conversation and their correspondence. Candour, humour, and above all a rejection of anything that could be mistaken for embarrassment or offended pride.*1 The dismissal of shame.
Boston, 2003: Something altogether new
‘Tell me, how are Nat and Gus? How’re they getting along?’
Saul and I were in the rear sitting room at Crowninshield Road, where we usually had our more earnest and more concerted chats, about politics, about religion, about literature. It was a comfortable room, a comfortable house: the habitat, you would say, of a senior Cambridge academic. ‘Guys, I’m rich,’ Saul announced to his friends in 1964, when Herzog was settling into its months as a bestseller (and publishers were splashing out on his backlist). ‘Can I buy you something? Do you need any money?’*2 Saul, in 2003, had been through several costly divorces; he had everything he wanted, and a bit more in reserve, but he wasn’t rich any more – not rich.
‘Nat and Gus, they’re fine, they’re great. And they’re tall, too.’ I said. Although Saul was acquainted with my younger daughters, he and my sons went back fifteen years. ‘They’re still at that school Latymer in West London. It’s not like St Paul’s or Westminster, but it’s solid enough. My mother’s father went there – in the 1900s it must’ve been.’
Now a silence began to steal over us. It was a new kind of silence, one never heard before…I’d spent the entire winter in Uruguay, and one way or another I hadn’t seen Saul for eighteen months: not since November 2001. And during that visit – to my surprise and relief – he was soothingly lucid (not at all like Iris. September 11, I concluded, was indeed just ‘too big’). But the silence around about us now was a frightening silence. I felt powerless to break it. Then Saul broke it, saying,
‘Tell me. How are Nat and Gus?’
…Was he joking? Was I dreaming? With an unsteady hand I lowered my coffee cup, and went through it all again: fine, great, tall, Latymer in West London…
The silence returned. Crushing, smothering, and quite unbelievably loud. This wasn’t forgetfulness – this was something altogether new. A shadow-line had been crossed. He said,
‘Nat and Gus. Tell me, how are they?’
…Well, I can’t claim I wasn’t warned.
Long Island, July 2001
Through the open windows of his study Martin could hear his middle daughter in the garden below; she was five, she was alone, and she was singing. What was that – what was solitary childsong? Something like a ventilation of happiness. Eliza, for now, was not letting off steam (as she frequently needed to do), but letting off happiness. Imagine.
Her voice made him happy, and he was happy anyway, steady-state happy (mark the date), but not quite happy enough to add his voice to hers; similarly, when she skipped along the pavement, he felt no urge to keep in step. And when she did cartwheels, he stayed upright. Now why was that?
As for Eliza’s little sister, Inez, well, she was twenty-five months. Not quite so many overflows of happiness for Inez, as yet. She had only just got here, only just touched down on the planet Earth; she was still feeling very shy, and there were all these new people – 8.5 billion of them. No wonder she sometimes hid her face and wept.
By a wonderful coincidence Inez shared a birthday (June 10) with her godfather, Saul – who was expected with his clan that afternoon. And it was a true coincidence, because Saul
